Saturday, March 21, 2009

Improving emphasis on your images with Picasa

Normally, we will have a part of the photos that we take that we want to emphasize on. The simplest way to do this is to set the right contrast in the photos and then to sharpen the images so that it stands out. The photo we have so far is rather “dull”.

The icon just below the straighten icon is the “Auto Contrast” icon. You can simply use this to improve the contrast of if you need more control on how much emphasis or highlights, you can use the 2nd tab “Tuning”. In this example, we just use the Auto Contrast.

As can be seen the software increased the contrast in the image and the tungsten lighting on the “TWINCAM” is not so dull. To further improve the image, we sharpen it.

In the 3rd tab called “Effects”, the first icon (on the left) of the first row is the sharpen icon. Simply use this to sharpen our image.

The image above is before sharpening and the one below is after applying the sharpening function.

It is hard to see with the naked eye in this blog but you will notice some “cleanup” around the ‘M’.